When I read Confessions of a Shopaholic, my reaction was not to tone down my shopping habit — after all, I was not as bad as Rebecca Bloomwood, the out-of-control heroine with a fabulous wardrobe in the Sophie Kinsella novel. I went shopping, despite the presumed lessons of the book.

Similarly, God Save My Shoes, a documentary about the relationship between women and their footwear, teeters between shoe porn and a psychological exploration of what makes women like professional poker player Beth Shak tick. “This is about want,” says Shak, owner of a collection of 1,400 pairs, most of them Louboutins. One pair is so beautiful she won’t even wear them.

In the early sequences, filmmaker Julie Benasra focuses on the “uncontrollable lust” for shoes, with subjects including Kelly Rowland, Dita Von Teese, Fergie and Baroness Monica von Neumann.

This is well-charted territory: “It’s a religion,” Von Teese says.

“A shoe tells who you are,” Fergie says.

And we may all get to be Cinderella.

The current craze for footwear is credited to Sex and the City, and its elevation of shoes as an object of desire, sexual tool and the affirmation, “I can afford these even when I can’t.”

Shoes have always been a symbol of social status, we learn from Elizabeth Semmelhack, curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. She points to the two-feet-high chopines worn in 16th-century Italy by courtesans and aristocrats — the more towering and impractical, the higher the status.

The situation is not too different today. A five-inch stiletto is really possible only for those with taxi and car services. And those cult designer shoes by Manolo Blahnik or Christian Louboutin — who appear in the film — can cost more than $1,000.

High fashion has been taking cues from fetish or hooker shoes for some time. Sexual commodification is an important part of high fashion, Semmelhack says. So what are you saying, she asks, when you don a pair of Versaces that look much like a pair of “working shoes” she shows — red, strappy and studded.

Semmelhack and Valerie Steele, curator of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, also touch the notion that high heels on women indicate power.

It’s more sexualized femininity than powerful femininity, Semmelhack argues, while Steele is cagier on the subject.

Clearly, all this lust is about high heels here, not just shoes.

The film provides some insight into the thinking of the men who design these shoes — Blahnik, Louboutin, Pierre Hardy, Walter Steiger and Bruno Frisoni speak at length about their craft.

Five inches is the max, Louboutin informs us, after which the centre of gravity is too forward and the only place to land is bed.

It is not sadism, Hardy argues, acknowledging that the least painful does not mean the same as painless. “Women will go very far with pain for heels,” he adds.

Meanwhile, the shoe porn, and its visions of five-inch studded or crystal-sculpted footwear, did not prompt a shopping spree on my part. Much as I love shoes, high heels hurt too much.

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